


When Brotherhood Come First

by chupacabra (butyoumight)



Series: Language Barrier [1]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Comfort No Hurt, Established Relationship, Language Barrier, Multi, Squad, Worlds 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-21 19:21:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14291697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butyoumight/pseuds/chupacabra
Summary: Earlier today had been almost all about Nathan. Right now, for Nathan, everything was about Shoma and Boyang.The newly crowned World Champion just wants to be there for his sort-of boyfriends.





	When Brotherhood Come First

**Author's Note:**

> Hi this is my first foray into writing for figure skating fandom, and I haven't written RPF in like ten years so. Here's hoping it's not terrible. 
> 
> Subtitle for this fic, and what will hopefully eventually be a full series: _I will be the sQuad OT3 content I want to see in the world_. I do eventually want to go back to some of the other competitions they've been at, in whole or in part, and like. Develop their relationship. But for this, so much of Worlds was just so painful that I just had to write the goddamn Comfort after all that Hurt. 
> 
> Dialogue spoken in either Japanese or Mandarin Chinese is displayed in the hopefully appropriate Kanji or Hanzi. On desktop, you can hover over any non-Roman characters for an instant translation. A fair warning, I don't actually speak either Japanese or Mandarin Chinese, everything is pulled directly from Google Translate, so sorry in advance if anything is horribly mistranslated. If you see something that should be corrected, please let me know, I will be happy to do so! 
> 
> If you're reading on mobile, obviously the hover-translation won't work, BUT fear not! This fic is still accessible even if you don't know the little bit of Japanese or Mandarin used. Generally speaking, any dialogue in Kanji or Hanzi isn't being understood by at least one of the characters in the scene either, but they still make it work. 
> 
> (Title taken unashamedly from the lyrics to _See You Again_.)

“Boyang-gē.” Nathan knocks gently on the hotel room door again. “是我. Nathan.” His Mandarin has always been shaky - honestly infantile at best - but he's been practicing with his mom a lot recently. She doesn’t really understand his suddenly increased interest, but she’s glad enough to coach him a little here and there when they have time, and his pronunciation is improving. He thinks.

There's a soft sound in the room, a shuffling, but no direct answer. Nathan glances to his side, and Shoma shrugs from his position against the wall. He's quiet as usual, eyes half-lidded. Tired doesn't even begin to cover it, and Nathan hadn't intended to have him come along, but he'd insisted. “連帯.” he'd said, which Nathan didn’t understand. Pressed, he’d tried “仲間?” instead, which Nathan understood only a little bit better. In the end, and clearly a bit annoyed with Nathan for being so dense, he snapped out, “Family!” in English, and Nathan finally got it. 

It was about support and unity. Nathan respects that. And besides, he wants to comfort Shoma too.

He knocks again. “Shoma 也在這裡.”  


There's no answer in words but the door opens, and Nathan actually feels a bit pained by the expression it reveals. Boyang put on such a strong fucking face when there were cameras around, smiling even through tears in the kiss and cry. He showed such strength, in so many ways. And yet here in private he looks so weak. Worn down. He doesn’t say anything, just blinks tiredly at Nathan, and then at Shoma.

“我們可以進來嗎?” Nathan asks after a moment of awkward silence. Boyang meets his eyes, and there's a ghost of a smile, just enough to catch a brief glimpse of his pointy tooth. He nods, and takes a step back, spreading his arm in invitation.

“你的中文越來越好.” Boyang says softly. Nathan gives him a kind of hapless grin, too tired to translate properly in his head. Boyang pouts, clearly searching his mind for any useful English to get his point across. He settles eventually on, “Better Chinese, you.”

“Ah. 謝謝.”

Shoma has already limped past them both and thrown himself on to Boyang's unmade bed. “腹減った.” Shoma grumbles into the duvet cover, rolls over, and stretches his right leg straight into the air. It’s such a Yuzuru move that Nathan can’t help but laugh a little.

Nathan glances over at Boyang, who is also watching Shoma’s foot as it bobs in the air, though maybe with slightly more visible concern.

Nathan follows after Shoma, sitting on the end of the bed, and grabs Shoma's leg, pulling it down into his lap. Shoma blinks sleepily at him again, but when Nathan makes no move to release him, he rolls his eyes and makes a similarly rolling motion with his hand. The _if you must_ is all but actively spoken, and Nathan doesn’t wait for him to change his mind, quickly tugging at the loosely tied laces of Shoma's sneaker so he can pull it off.

Boyang stands nearby awkwardly for a moment, but Nathan gives him a look and then beckons him closer. There's plenty of bed for all of them. Earlier today had been almost all about Nathan. Right now, for Nathan, everything is about Shoma and Boyang. 

Boyang finally sits down on the bed, right behind Nathan. Nathan looks over his shoulder at him, even as his hands start to explore the damage Shoma’s new boots have done to his right foot this week. The blisters and bruises are to be expected - almost all skaters have them almost all of the time, and it’s always worse when breaking in new boots. But when Nathan runs his first two fingers down Shoma’s instep, the smaller man hisses a pained breath between his teeth. The media had been mischaracterizing it as an ankle injury for days, due in no small part to the specter of Yuzuru’s injury, Nathan guessed. But it wasn’t quite, and Nathan had seen that from the start. 

“你可以依靠我.” Nathan addresses this to Boyang, who gives him a surprised look, but does as asked, turning to press his back against Nathan’s so the younger man can take some of the weight from his shoulders. Tentatively, Boyang’s hand finds Shoma’s hair on the bedclothes, and begins to idly stroke through the strands, thoughtfully sorting the highlights from the natural darker sections. Shoma makes a soft sound, somewhere between exhaustion and relaxation. It's a nice sound. The impact it has on Nathan has never waned, even though it’s a sound Shoma makes often enough to be deeply familiar - probably even to people who don't spend the night with Shoma three or four times a year.

Contented for a moment, Nathan turns his attention back to Shoma’s foot, and he starts cautiously massaging at some of the tension he finds all the way up Shoma’s calf and down through his arch. Shoma continues making soft sounds, but as Nathan gets more comfortable with which parts of Shoma's foot are more sensitive and which parts are just tense, the sounds shift in tone from slightly pained to lightly pleasurable.

After a while of this companionable quiet, Boyang releases a sigh, one that sounds heavy enough that he’s surely been holding on to it for hours. Nathan feels Boyang’s shoulders go a bit slack as some of his tension leaks out, and he began to speak.

His words come fast, phrases bleeding together, and Nathan can barely piece any of it together - but this is pretty typical for Boyang. Once he pulls his thoughts together enough to open up about them, it’s like a faucet, free-flowing. Plus, Nathan suspects that the language barrier is part of the point for Boyang, that it _helps_ that neither Shoma nor Nathan can follow his Mandarin. When Boyang wants them to understand him, he enunciates and speaks more slowly, more clearly. They all do it, actually, even Nathan with English, because it may be the closest thing they have to a common language but it’s neither Shoma’s nor Boyang’s mother tongue, and for Nathan, that means he’s going to be fucking considerate. 

Anyway. Boyang’s smoothing all his words together, speaking with the liquidity that Nathan’s mom uses when she calls the big family back home, so that he can just vent and express himself, completely, without answering questions, explaining his feelings, or feeling like a burden. 

Or maybe Nathan is projecting a bit? After all, it was only a year ago that _Nathan_ missed the podium. He panicked and cracked, crashed and burned. Went from being America’s golden boy to being just another fresh kid who couldn’t handle the pressure of big competitions. It had, put simply, sucked. And he had been bitterly lonely. He hadn’t been as close to Shoma and Boyang then as he was now.

All Nathan wants, here in the denouement of his big redemption story, is to provide to Boyang what he wished he’d had then. Even if it was just a shoulder to lean on while he ranted. No judgement. Just understanding from someone who’d been there, at the bottom of a mistake he shouldn’t have made, a jump he shouldn’t have missed. 

He’s catching a few of Boyang's words, here and there. Enough to get the gist, anyway. Boyang’s disappointed in himself. He let a mistake early in the program unsettle him. He hadn't been feeling well since the morning after the short, but tried to pretend it away. Nathan hears Shoma's name and the words for _respect_ and _distraction_ both in the same sentence, and guesses that Boyang hadn't wanted a minor illness to be paraded around like it was some kind of excuse for falls and poor scores. 

“沒有任何藉口.” Boyang says, a bit of a snap in the words that hints the end of his rant is near. He looks up to fix each of them with a blazing stare. Challenging them to argue. He shifts his weight, reaching down to grip Shoma's knee, and then with a tone of weary annoyance- “Even hurt, get two place.”

Shoma frowns, places his hand over Boyang's, and threads their fingers together. He says something in rapid Japanese, most of which Nathan doesn’t catch. The one word Nathan really notices is 'baka'. He knows what it means, but without following the context, he can’t figure out who Shoma is calling an idiot- himself or Boyang. 

Shoma points with his free hand at his own foot, where Nathan’s hands are still unconsciously smoothing over the blisters and bruising and pain. He switches to his heavily accented English, each word carefully pecked out for clarity. “Stupid me. Put off breaking boots. Hurt my own fault.” 

Boyang’s face twists into a little scowl. It looks weird on him. “And? Still silver!” He shoots back in equally accented English. Seeing them bicker like this in English is so fascinating to Nathan. He almost feels like he’s watching a basketball game, the way he’s turning his gaze to each of their faces in turn, waiting for the next pass. 

Shoma says ‘baka’ again, and this time he pokes Boyang in the chest when he says it, so there’s no confusion about who he means this time. Boyang looks mildly affronted, maybe teetering on the edge of insecurity - or maybe that’s Nathan projecting again - and Shoma sits up to defend his point, crossing his arms over his chest. Shoma’s extremely formidable when he wants to be, and Boyang has the good sense to look a little abashed in the face of such condensed fury, even if he’s not fully feeling it.

Between the two of them, Nathan can’t help a fond little smile from twisting his lips, and he lifts a hand to cover it so they don’t think he’s making fun of them. He’s not. He just really appreciates how close they’ve grown over the past year. This conversation - _almost_ an argument - is crystal clear to all three of them, despite the language barriers. That couldn’t have happened a year ago, before Shoma became fluent in Boyang, or Boyang learned to speak Shoma.

“Can’t skate clean every time.” Shoma says sharply. “Not machine.” 

Boyang doesn’t respond immediately. He’s clearly annoyed that they’ve managed to find a way to lecture him into being nicer to himself even when he was supposedly just going to get to rant and complain without challenge. But he’s also smart enough to know that if he keeps digging his hole, they’ll keep following him down it.

“Get back up. Do better next time.” Shoma says, soft and serious. The words ping against something in Nathan’s memory, his mother’s voice echoing across the ice. 

“下次做得更好.” Nathan offers, his voice just as soft as Shoma’s. 

Boyang looks from Shoma to Nathan, closes his eyes, and slowly, a smile creeps onto his face. Not the plastered-on smile he wore in the kiss and cry, smiling through pain and anger and upset just for his fans. No, this is a real smile, a smile _for_ them, which is all the sweeter because he, and they, know he doesn’t _have_ to smile, not when it’s just them.

“好吧好吧.” He gives them both a little smirk, a wag of one eyebrow. “Nèisēn-dì mean. No protect Boyang from scary Shoma-dì.” 

Nathan smiles, and ducks his head. He’s told Boyang he can call him Wei so many times that he’s lost count. Boyang always agrees, thanks him for the consideration, and then proceeds to call him Nèisēn anyway.

Nathan sets Shoma’s foot down in his lap so he can clap his hands together in front of his face, turning to look at Boyang with a purposefully pathetic expression. “抱歉, Boyang-gē! 請原諒我!”

Boyang actually laughs at that, reaching out to put his arms around Nathan’s shoulders and give him a tug. Nathan pushes Shoma’s leg carefully out of his lap before letting himself be pulled down so that he’s lying half on Boyang, half on the bed, with Shoma pressed up against him on the other side. 

“Hey!” He protests, but half-heartedly, because really, who wouldn’t like a cuddle like this? Idiots, that’s who. “I’m the champion. I don’t need to be comforted!” 

“閉嘴.” Boyang says, and Shoma says, “黙れ.” And Nathan has heard both of those things often enough that he knows exactly what they mean. 

He laughs. Maybe, well, maybe he can accept this offer... Not as a comfort, but maybe a reward?

Has he earned this?

“Neisan.” Shoma grumbles, dragging the second syllable out in a long whine, mouth pressed against Nathan’s arm. “Get food? Menu stupid.” 

Nathan tilts his head up, but before he can figure out where the room service menu in question is, Boyang has it in his hand and is hitting him in the face with it. 

The menu is, predictably, in Italian. For all that Boyang and Shoma can piece out quite a bit of English when spoken, the Roman alphabet is still an annoying mystery to them both. Nathan can’t blame them for that. “Alright.” He lays back again, opening the menu and holding it out so they can all look at the little pictures next to some of the options. “What kind of food?”

Boyang gives a full-body shrug. “任何你想要的.” 

“肉.” Shoma says, simply and predictably. 

Nathan laughs. Honestly, he’s not sure why he even bothered asking.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I can be found on twitter at [@figuretreyting](https://twitter.com/figuretreyting) where I spend most of my time crying over Nathan Chen in one way or another.


End file.
